Title

Authors

Publication Date

April 2017

Advisor(s)

Ruth Nisse

Major

English, Medieval Studies

Language

English (United States)

Abstract

This thesis proposes a television adaptation of two fourteenth-century alliterative poems, the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Historical context and analysis inform a reading of the Alliterative Morte Arthure as a text that connects chivalry, Christianity, and the Crusades to suggest that the practice of chivalry is cannibalistic and self-destructive. The interpretation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reinforces and expands on the knight as a site of consumption. These texts come together in a television miniseries that adapts alliteration into a visual mode to work out the themes of Orientalism, nationalism, and militarism in the poems and in our world today.